14 Algorithms and Immediacy

Opening scene. My students don’t get it. “Critical distance”? They don’t grasp either one of these words separately and, even more, the students do not get these words when they are combined. They do understand the fiery pool reflected in the asphalt though. That’s them. They’re in it, and whatever critique is it begins there: not at one or two steps removed nor at arm’s length. It is spring semester 2024 and we’ve been reading Nick Seaver’s Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Almost from the start, I couldn’t help but notice the divergence between what constitutes my own sense of “taste” (particularly musical taste)—how it came to be shaped—and theirs. I grew up (my teens and twenties were in the 1970s to ’80s) reading music critics, often reading about music before I ever heard it (sometimes I never heard it), guided by a community of discourse-shapers that evaluated and ranked and wrestled with aesthetic questions of sociocultural mattering that, by necessity, extended beyond the music itself. But my students are always already awash in streaming music, in YouTube playlist shufflings, in micro-nudgey recommendations that come from friends and algorithms arrayed across the oscillating rhythms of immersion/distraction and along the half-attentive fringes of their social media saturation. In a kind of reverse flow, music and its recommendation architectures seek them out as much, if not more than, the other way around. It’s all one fiery pool: moving sign and asphalt and reflection combined.

To my students, it doesn’t really matter all that much what criticism now does (or once did), or, more properly, the ways that critique used to be practiced and the ways that value or taste are formed, deformed, unformed. So, I wonder: Where does “distance” go under these contemporary circumstances? What, if now, the work of critique-in-this-moment requires us to be less intent at attaining the quasi-fixed coordinates of spatiality but, rather, finds us leaning toward a negotiation with the alternately recursive-prehensive motions of temporality, of tempo/rhythm? Why tarry long with a critical lens that imagines itself (quite literally “sees” itself) as somehow outside of (or near but alongside) the concatenation of ordinary everyday ongoingness? Haven’t the historically particular generational-technological-economic-material-affective intersections—as they always tend to do—once again shifted the scene of pedagogy, working to resituate the ways we teach, learn, sense, value, live?1

So, to be clear, this memorandum shall not be composing a comparison/contrast that outlines an eminently deteriorating capacity for discernment among young people (teens and twenty-somethings) as a sadly diminished version of my (and others) more sophisticated, stabilized, and highly advanced taste- and subject-formation. Gen Z is quite capable of subtle parsings and miniscule distinctions in and through all manner of encounters with aesthetic and sociocultural-political importance, music and otherwise; just sit in a classroom full of nineteen- to twenty-year-olds as they watch and comment upon a social media influencer’s “apology video” and find a near-universe of agreement—with minor pockets of debate—around the nuanced shadings of authenticity, peak platform tempos, market demands, and emotional manipulation.2 Navigating immediacy is their—and our—(re)current condition.

But this has never been an entirely new set of affairs, even if what qualifies as “immediacy” has arrived with different flavors and textures across history. In 1928, Walter Benjamin relayed his views on the immediacy thesis in his pithy THIS SPACE FOR RENT aphorism from One-Way Street. My epigraph has already quoted its final two sentences, but it opens like this: “Fools lament the decay of criticism. For its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where prospectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely to human society” (1928/1978, 74). In his own era, Benjamin was engaging, most of all, with the reshapings of experience wrought by the (in)corporeal and haptic impressions of the image through the circulation of photography in the domestic sphere as well as the immense popularity of the cinematic apparatus as a public phenomenon (with the material-imaginal interweavings of movie house architecture/enraptured spectator/dream-like screen projection). With tongue partially in cheek, Benjamin announces, in THIS SPACE FOR RENT, the eclipse of a particular manner of judgment. For better or worse, reflective critique (with its deliberate construction of critical distance) could not hope to keep pace with the fiery asphalt pool of the neon advert. Instead, Benjamin wagers that some mode of immanent-speculative critique is better suited to the tasks demanded of the translators and critics in his time.3

But this practice of arms-length, mediating critique is never going to fade out entirely (nor should it and I am not sure that Benjamin ever expected that it would: After all, who knows where/how the histories of human-techné might twist and turn next?). Indeed, almost a hundred years down the road, rationalist-impersonal-distanced critique more than persists—it has become the (re)ascendent interpretative posture of some of the most prominent theorists of communicative capitalism and our digital/algorithmic culture: among them, Jodi Dean, Mark Andrejevic, and Anna Kornbluh. While I will mainly focus on Kornbluh’s recent Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, it might be illuminating to briefly consider what these three theorists share between them:

1. a deep appreciation for psychoanalytic interpretations of subjectivity and culture (in particular, Jacques Lacan’s tripartite schema of “the real”/“the imaginary”/“the symbolic”),
2. a deep suspicion of affect, including affect theory itself, and, for them, its complicit role in the eminently embodied nature of immediacy and the subsequent collapse of critical distance (aka the “decline of symbolic efficiency” as a critically minded act of mediation [contra immediation] that cannot be shunted aside),
3. a deeply held belief in the reliable-enough inner coherence of the “subject” (as formed/structured, consciously/unconsciously, by language and symbol usage) perpetually unsettled by forces on its exterior,
4. a deeply wired (Hegelian) privileging of critical tactics of dichotomization via the introduction/excavation of lived contradictions and conceptual separations (gaps) as dialectical binarisms to be categorized and synthesized as a means for sublating this herd of particulars in order to grasp, perhaps then transcend, the ever more intimate yet immense predations of capital.

Turning to Immediacy, we find Anna Kornbluh pointing a finger directly at the algorithmic as the prime suspect in the hyper-inflation of the topsy-turvy realm of the imaginary—where we lose our bearings in the distortion field of big-data-driven distractions and the continuous pulsations of “visceral activation” (2023, 63). Engulfed in the churning midst of the economy’s digital circulation of valuations and the increasing platformization of ordinary experience, whatever sorts of pattern-matching, parsing, and evaluating we participate in now have been overrun by the flattened affective tonality of “algorithmic cultural categories” (60). And it is not just the ordinary givenness of experience but the very practice of theory itself that has been bent and broken by its unseemly “emulation of algorithms” (171). According to Kornbluh, it is only by reasserting the place and functioning of the more level-headed and rationalist “symbolic”—in a deliberately Brechtian-like distanciation maneuver—that we can hope to unlock the possibilities of “stepping away from the thick of things” (62), thus wedging a critical crowbar into immediacy’s pressing-too-close in order to, instead, “propel thought through impasses, to negate what is merely given, and then to negate the negation, convoking readers to collective composition” (64). Further still, it is our task as educators to step into this “special opening” so that “our classrooms can be clinics of mediacy, where we thicken the symbolic, estrange language, closely read, uncover unknowns, slow down, value impersonality, construct objectivity” (22). The critic and teacher mediates in order to open a gap in immediacy’s far too messy-fleshy affectability, to slow the flow, to defamiliarize, to remind everyone who will listen that the act of valuing and judging within experience should be exteriorized and objectified. Instead of “unshutting theory to ever more counter-rationalist topoi (affects, dogs, rocks, affects again),” we must return “precedence” to “reflection, transcendence, and the verticality of perspectival remove or causal analysis,” to “educing contradictions, critiquing ideology, or drawing lines in the sand” (174). Now, to be fair, as a university professor of digital communication for over three decades, I recognize the strategic necessity of regularly slowing, reflecting, estranging, and more in the classroom . . . of course! But there is just as much (if not more) political-critical potential to be discovered in the midst of tempos and flux of the contemporary by not precluding affective maneuverability as a viable, a-dialectical position.4 Indeed, how can one readily dispatch the affective and substitute the rational as if it is not always saturated and oriented by feeling-ness?

So, while I am nowhere near bold or foolish enough to declare this melodramatic narrativization of our algorithmic crisis-state to be rather wrongheaded, there is a decidedly strange atmosphere of nostalgia in these formulations (“let’s reenlist Hegel and Lacan to shake our fists at cloud computing!”) as Kornbluh mounts a tirelessly valiant retrieval of a not-exactly-long-lost moment of critical rectitude (“will someone please roll Benjamin over to tell him that the flavor he thought had faded is coming back into style?”). McKenzie Wark, in her review of Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory, captures quite effectively the anxious but wistful historical-conceptual mood that arises when theorists like Dean, Andrejevic, or Kornbluh reroute their “decline of symbolic efficiency” thesis toward the up escalator of contemporary critique and out from under the shadows of the psychoanalytic Big Other:

Lacan’s famous tripartite of imaginary, symbolic and real is actually an effect of a certain moment in the development of media. It was a stage in the evolution of Haraway’s cyborg, when different technics became the mediating apparatus for different flows of sensation. . . . This explains so much of the anxiety of the literate classes: the struggle of the typewriters against the screen, insisting on this or that symbolic order against the self/other fluctuations of screen-generated media, and with the grain of the voice as residual stand-in for the real beyond both. All of which, of course, media convergence erases. We’re differently wired cyborgs now. (2017, 155; emphasis in original)

Wark continues: “I don’t think the road to strategy necessarily always passes through critique, or through a politics of the subject as formed in the symbolic register. Perhaps the flux between the imaginary and the real is where the human resides most of the time anyway. It is not as if the symbolic has reliably been our friend” (155). In a Facebook reply to Wark’s original post in 2015, Dean acknowledges in her very first words, that she did indeed “underplay (ignore, fail to attend to) [the] real struggle over ‘tech and flesh’” (2015). Needless to say, however, it is precisely the very real struggle between “tech and flesh,” between algorithmic calculation and corporeal immediacy, that any contemporary inclination toward symbolic efficiency’s revival will attempt to bypass, underplay or, in Kornbluh’s case, overdramatize: listening for the echoes from an era when it was firmly believed that questions about the ways we think and know would find all their necessary answers on the terrain of the rational-epistemological—or, to repeat Kornbluh, through processes of “reflection, transcendence, and the verticality of perspectival remove.” Experientially and theoretically however, there are other critical tactics arrayed across the critical-conceptual landscape—to be invented and/or refashioned—as potential tools/weapons, escape routes, or countermovements from within the constrictive coils of capitalist captures.

At base, I would argue that the most fervent maneuverings of critique today are far less about achieving a clean set of separations from the mess we’re in and much more about, as Lauren Berlant succinctly puts it, “training for a feeling I [and we] don’t have yet” (2023, 453). This means to inhabit, experientially and experimentally, the lived as it sludges and smears—without presuming such inhabitation will devolve into immediacy as acquiescence (but neither does it require one to perpetually pry open gaps in order to mediate and tag all-the-things like a frantic butterfly collector).5 Just because such practicings of feeling are often middling, (im)mediated, and muddled (or opaque) does not render their practice inherently depoliticized, auto-inoculated against community building, and otherwise ignorant or vacuously jubilant in the face of ideological (and algorithmic) machinations. Are such valuative-immersive feeling practices also ambiguous? Oh yes, very much so.6 But the shifting and sifting mobilities of immanent-speculative critique are also perched and pitched in the midst of the roil of digitally inflected livingness, both granular and wide scope, ready to push and pull at the contours of collective and calculative agreements/disagreements.

But most enticing is the option of re-beginning the place of critique elsewhere. Here I am thinking especially of Katherine McKittrick’s call to redraw our methodological approaches to algorithms by asking “where we know from,” and then, even further, asking what it might mean to begin from “a black sense of place”—by way of Sylvia Wynter’s “being human as praxis” (i.e., the socio-historical particularities of racialized livingness vs. the sheerly omniscient, too-knowing/all-surveying eye from nowhere). Thus, what might it mean “as intellectuals [to] believe in opacity and giving on and with rather than finding, grasping, having” (2021, 117)? In other words, in its foundational dichotomy of experiential interiority/exteriority, there is a fairly high dose of what Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007, 70) has shown to be the unbearable whiteness of the Enlightenment’s “transparent I” (and transparent eye, for that matter) in the philosophical-theoretical armature wielded by the practitioners of critical distanciation as their angle onto how to outrun/outgun/undo algorithmic ways of knowing.7 It should come as no surprise then that, as an analytic strategy, distanced critique frequently ends up either downplaying or overstating, if not also mischaracterizing, the ontological reach and depths of the algorithmic—as if all flesh (every mode of livingness) is equally affectable!—while also reduplicating/mimicking the fully astride-the-world, in-gathering tendencies of the algorithm’s pulverizing yet differentially aggregative logics.8

Beginning in an analytic and alive elsewhere is, as McKittrick advises, one way to slip the loop of rationalist critique’s rote proceduralisms that will only return, over and over again, to swallow the tail of their own initiating conditions and coordinates. In the neon sign’s fiery reflection in the asphalt, Walter Benjamin seizes upon an opportunity to productively deflect the overworn mode of critique of his time toward a lively and much more speculative practice. If immediacy is the symptom of our age, we will never undo the full press of algorithms by closely negotiating with their (il)logics and metrics while writing off flesh and affects as unwelcome, nonpotentializing impediments along the path to distanced critique’s ultimate transcendence of them all.